


do you still remember feeling young?

by anneblacks



Series: tell me: [1]
Category: Keeper of the Lost Cities Series - Shannon Messenger
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Artist Keefe Sencen, Biana Vacker Character Study, Bisexual Biana Vacker, Character Study, F/F, F/M, Gen, Hair Dyeing, M/M, Multi, POC Vackers, Some Slightly Crude Humor (it's all Keefe), Southeast Asian Vackers, Tattoos, Weapons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-26
Updated: 2020-11-26
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:15:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27730648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anneblacks/pseuds/anneblacks
Summary: Once, when she was younger, she threw herself between her brother and his best friend and demanded them towork it out.Once, when she was younger, she was the one fighting with Fitz, feeling fierce and angry and every bit made of lightning that wouldn’t leave until hours later when Fitz took her hand and she let him hold it.Once, closer to now than anything she can callyounger,she slipped out a door and chased after two people who had her best friend in a vice grip of frozen and lungless, and she only remembers nothings and agony and waking up with her skin on fire.Or: a character study.
Relationships: Biana Vacker & Linh Song, Biana Vacker/Linh Song, Sophie Foster/Keefe Sencen/Fitz Vacker
Series: tell me: [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2028418
Comments: 12
Kudos: 18





	do you still remember feeling young?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MyUncreativeUserSorry](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MyUncreativeUserSorry/gifts).



> Hi! This literally came out of nowhere while I was trying to clean up _much_ shorter character studies I'd been planning on posting here, so it's a mess and it's unedited, and I think I love it a lot? I can't really tell yet. Quick notes are that 1. this is a fic written by a person who's only finished Lodestar and hasn't touched the likes of Flashback yet, so that's why it's tagged Canon Divergence, 2. I owe a lot of this to Farris (MyUncreativeUserSorry), who posted the original prompts for the character studies that this stemmed from. They're the best, and 3. this is probably going to be out-of-character but I've tried my best and I hope you enjoy it.
> 
> Also! The title is from "Fearless" by Louis Tomlinson, which is just in general a vibey song, and fits what I was going for fairly well. Enjoy your read!

> _i have seen you before: the bravest soldier, the frontliner, raised angry and raised with a sword in your hands and armor tight on your chest. you have fought on many a battlefield and you have won many a war. i have seen your hands tremble with the weight of a victory you hand up to your general; i have seen your loudness. i have seen you fight for all it’s worth, bloody hands and buckling knees, and i have seen you fall out of line._

Biana is a thunderstorm, in her truest form.

She is dark and she is intangible and she is unpredictable and yet those who know her well can spot her coming from miles off, with great power to hurt and great power to nourish, a delicate balance that she has tipped to the edge of pouring herself out for the people she loves. Once, when she was younger, she threw herself between her brother and his best friend and demanded them to _work it out._ Once, when she was younger, she was the one fighting with Fitz, feeling fierce and angry and every bit made of lightning that wouldn’t leave until hours later when Fitz took her hand and she let him hold it.

Once, closer to now than anything she can call _younger,_ she slipped out a door and chased after two people who had her best friend in a vice grip of frozen and lungless, and she only remembers nothings and agony and waking up with her skin on fire.

Sometimes she doesn’t recognize herself in the mirror, when she’s lost enough sleep to stumble into the closet and stare at all the limbs she hasn’t lost yet, when she’s small enough that she can’t reach the top of the mirror or pull the curtains to it shut with less than five minutes of tugging. Others, though—like when Keefe shows her a sketch he’s made, pensive smile on his face, of her hugging a plush animal to her ribs with an elbow and sitting with a pen tucked between her teeth—she does, and she feels proud of herself.

“Look at that,” Biana says, clipping the newest sketch to her mirror. “You’re still you.”

☾

She’s found, over the years, that her mind moves quick and no one can track it very well, because she’ll see a dandelion and pause to smile at it before she’s climbing up a tree as a vantage point to find more of them (and effectively bewilder Sophie, who’s picked the dandelion with a held breath), or see someone trip and fall unnoticed and head towards the nearest medic herself without a second thought (and have the rest of the Keeper crew turning Foxfire over looking for her). She needs things to do with her hands, and since she lost her favorite crochet needles last month, she’s started training extensively in self-defense.

Woltzer has had her training with a longsword for the past week now. They’re weekly sessions, and at the end of each one, he gives her a book entailing several techniques of one style and reminds her of their deal—no disappearing, and in exchange she gets something to do when everyone’s off on their own time. She takes her time to learn the history of each of them: the meditation technique that has been used for centuries upon centuries, and the swift and efficient chokeholds of the goblins of many eons before the present day. Ro, Keefe’s bodyguard who often drags him along to see the fragile elves train in the arena, calls it beautiful. Biana still doesn’t believe in that ethic, but she can see it in the elegant sweep of a zweihänder when she goes to visit the goblins’ training courts, so she doesn’t argue when Ro goes off on a tangent again.

“I know I say it a lot,” Ro says one unreasonably cold day while Biana's taking a break off the ring, “but I’m still never going to get used to how _weird_ you elves look.”

Biana blinks at her, pausing in sharpening the blade of her xiphos, and asks, “Why do we look weird?” Agreeing with her doesn't mean Biana can't dispute Ro's constant berating of elven society.

Ro leans back on her hands and runs her tongue over her teeth, eyes narrowed on the training court in use below them. “You just… all look so _naked._ ”

“ _Naked?”_

“It’s because we don’t have any markings, or, like, colorful body parts,” Keefe says, leaning out from the other side of Ro. “Apparently everyone else has really cool patterns and colors and stuff that they can be identified with, but all of our identifiers are on the inside. Like, blood and saliva, and—eyeballs? Do eyeballs count?”

“Yes,” Ro points at him, “But all your eyes are the _same color_ and they don’t even have cool patterns in different color spectrums—”

“ _Color spectrums?”_ Biana asks, but they’re already going off again.

“Oh, Keefe, you’ve got to tell her the best thing—”

Keefe, horrifyingly, looks delighted. “Bee, you wouldn’t _believe_ where goblins have their identifiers—”

“—not _that one_ —”

“By all the Council, I don’t want to hear it, Keefe—”

She dyes her hair cobalt after that training. Blue stains the sinks and the tile floors until she takes a cloth and their strongest cleaning elixir to them a week later and comes out of the restroom with roughened red hands and a straight spine.

Fitz sees the bathtub stained blue when he comes over to borrow her shampoo yet again, looks between her hair and the suspicious-looking bathtub with the bottle still in his hands, and then asks if he can get his hair done too. His is pink and turns the bathtub a softer shade of purple. Sophie stares at him the next time he comes over, and Keefe runs his hands through his hair and spends hours finding the exact shade of pink to brush over the portrait he’s been working on in Biana’s closet for weeks.

“Do you think he’ll like it?” Keefe asks her, when the portrait is drying on the top shelf. They’ve both been looking at it for several long minutes, hands on hips, Biana’s hands dry and Keefe’s covered in the deep dark color he used for Fitz’s skin. He’s hesitant as ever, scared as ever underneath all that bravado, and while she can’t believe he still thinks Fitz is going to hate it even though Fitz’s room is just wall-to-wall paintings, she still shakes her head and takes a step back, gaze still on the blue of her brother’s eyes.

“Absolutely not, Keefe,” she turns to him, grinning, “he’s going to love it.”

☾

Her shoulders hold the weight of unshed tears and lightning streaks over her skin in permanent scars; she lets her cape fall against her back rather than her shoulders, flaunts the scars alongside floral jerkins and necklaces sporting diamond carvings. She has faced death and she won. She is always cold, but she wears vests and short sleeves and low-collared outfits anyway, putting her scars—and, eventually, the ink curling over them—on display.

“Why’d you choose the vines?” asks Linh, quiet, as she traces fingers over the lines of petals on the heel of her palm. They barely cover the scars—if anything, they only amplify the paleness of them against her already-dark skin, black tiger lilies and vines winding over and across them. She knows they’d all seen the other designs Keefe had suggested—patches of vines, thick and unyielding, there to cover and hide and make disappear—but Linh is the only one who’s asked.

“They’re really cool, mostly,” Biana tells her, honest as ever, and waits for Linh to smile up at her—flash of tongue between teeth, eyes crinkling—before adding, “And I didn’t want to hide them.”

Linh pauses, taking this in, before nodding and ducking her head to look at the flowers again, her mind seemingly already on something else. “They’re so pretty,” she says absentmindedly, and leans off the bed to pull up her case of paints, concentrated look on her face.

“Wha—? Linh!”

“Stay still, Bee, I’m gonna do one thing, really small, okay—”

“—I _just_ cleaned the sheets from last time.”

Linh scoffs out a laugh, settling behind Biana and brushing her hair away from the back of her neck. “Mm-hmm. There’s yellow right next to your thigh and I’m about to use white.”

Biana huffs, flicking her eyes down and poking a finger at the yellow stain of paint in the sheets. “Of course.”

Then there’s a brush gentle and damp against her back, and Biana stays still and breathes.

> _you are a quiet soldier, now, with shaking hands and an unsteady tilt to your mouth, but you are still whole. i know it is hard to believe, with all these scars, with all these chest pains, but look, you’ve grown since then. you’ve made them into ink and wondrous color since then. i know it changes near to nothing, but you are alive, still, and you are different and the same._
> 
> _let out a breath. look into the mirror._
> 
> _you are still whole._

**Author's Note:**

> Note number 4: I went into this with the character summary that Biana is fast and bright and quick-moving, similar to a thunderstorm, and has cobalt hair, and came out with goblin training sessions and Ro and Keefe being a Duo again (and SOKEEFITZ), because I miss them a lot. Also I should have asked someone for butt jokes before I wrote Keefe and Ro's banter because now I'm feeling self-conscious about it.
> 
> (EDIT: I went to go look it up because of Ro's conversation with Biana (which should have gotten her to go get tattoos but oof) but humans actually do have some patterns which can only be seen in UV light or if a person has a certain skin condition, which we're all born with and are called Blaschko's Patterns. They're very swirly and less cool than I expected in images, but the articles are Very Neat certified. Headcanon that elves don't have these mayhaps?)
> 
> I hope you enjoyed (and if you did leave a comment + kudos)! You guys are wonderful and I hope you have a good day/night and wherever you are please take care of yourselves! These are some wild times.


End file.
